Designed as part of a collaborative charrette sponsored by the Museum
of Modern Art, this project proposes a new landscape diffusing the relationship
between land and water in the face of projected sea-level
rise due to global warming. The site, currently home to Liberty State
Park, is composed entirely of landfill and will be largely under water
at high tide by 2060. Rather than take defensive measures to either
protect the site or return it to an increasingly indeterminate state of
nature, Intertidal envisions a land-water testing ground, trying out
new relationships between land and water, new forms of amphibious
agriculture, aquaculture, recreation, bioremediation, hydrological
testing on a site that is in a state of perpetual construction.

The essence of the project is a cut-and-fill logic that removes land
to create three giant inlets on the site, and moves it to adjacent
areas to create subtle new shifts in topography that work with tides
and seasonal floods to create dramatic differences in land-form and
-use between low and high water. The inlets are delimited by four
large pier formations, each subdivided by a wedge-form cross grain
that creates a smooth gradient between land and water. Each wedge
becomes a petri dish, an isolated test-bed for the amphibious
programs listed above. The programs situated within a given wedge
are organized according to water flows - from dry to wet, high to
low, and fresh to saline. While programs bleed across the petri-dish
boundaries to form new and unexpected relationships, the result is
a landscape of radical differentiation that takes transformation as a
normative condition, rather than a means to an end.

Exhibited at MoMA as part of Rising Currents.AIANY 2012 Merit Award for Urban Design.